White House Honors 11 Immigrants as Champions of Change

The White House has honored 11 immigrant innovators and entrepreneurs as “Champions of Change,”including a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin.
The immigrants are “the best and brightest from around the world who are helping create American jobs, grow our economy, and make our nation more competitive.”
Amar Sawhney, medical device inventor and entrepreneur, holds more than 120 patents and has founded six companies that employ more than 1,600 people and have generated more than $1.5 billion in revenue. He lives in Boston and is the President and CEO of Ocular Therapeutix, Inc.
He also founded a medical device incubator, Incept.
Sawhney, a native of India, moved to the United States in 1987. He became an entrepreneur because he applied for 30 jobs in the U.S. but he got rejected from all of them because he didn’t have a green card. So he decided to pursue a Ph.D. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992.
“If you have not much to lose, you take more risk and you try harder,” Sawhney said in the Youtube video from the Immigrant Learning Center.